Darkness
by Lord Byron
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light...
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd...
Dark Horizon
In the 1700s, slaves in what would become Haiti began to awaken to a new
religion - Vodun (aka Voodoo). Led by Toussaint l'Overture, the people of
Haiti fought a long, bloody rebellion against the French and the English,
attempting to gain their freedom. They succeeded in 1803. By the time
Charles Babbage and Percy Bysshe Shelley were born in 1791 and 1792
(respectively), and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797, Vodun had a
firm grasp on the country. History has forgotten how these individuals and
Vodun would combine to change the future.
By 1803, the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had been visiting her mother's
gravesite for years. Even at age 6, she was already fascinated with death.
Charles Babbage was more fascinated with mathematics, and by 1810, attending
Trinity College in Cambridge, he was already smarter than his teachers and
entirely obsessed with calculations. Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the other
hand, was already obsessed with ghastly, gothic fantasies. Plagued by
nervous attacks, and often in a drug-induced, hallucinatory stupor, he
eloped with Harriet Westbrooke and headed for London to meet one of his
heroes, William Godwin.
Charles Babbage settled down in London, married Georgina Whitmore, became a
member of the Royal Society and prepared for a quiet life of calculation and
math. Percy Bysshe Shelley met William's daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin, fell in love, abandoned his pregnant wife and fled to Europe, ready
to begin a life of wild debauchery and adventure.
In 1815, Lord Byron's wife gave birth to Ada Lovelace. Fearing that her
child would be in danger from Byron's lifestyle, she legally separated from
Byron and got sole custody of the child. Byron cared little; like Shelley,
he was a true romantic, ready for a life of wild parties and mistresses. In
fact, one of his many mistresses turned out to be Claire Clairmont, whom he
met in London - Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's half-sister. Mary, Percy,
Claire and Byron all met soon thereafter, and after Claire became pregnant
under not-so-suspicious circumstances, the trio pursued Byron to Europe,
where they eventually caught up with him in Geneva.
At perhaps the most famous house party in all history, Byron challenged his
guests to tell a scary story. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, having been
plagued by death for her entire life, and having a gothic wretch for a
lover, dreamed up the horrifying Frankenstein (which would be published 2
years later, in 1818). Shortly thereafter, after the suicide of Percy
Shelley's pregnant wife, Mary married Shelley and became Mary Shelley.
By 1820, Charles Babbage had made quite a name for himself as well. He had
founded the Analytical Society with Herschel and Peacock and had played a
key role in the founding of the Astronomical Society. Absorbed by
mathematics, he began his life's work of developing calculating machinery.
With a grant from the government in 1823, he started work on the Difference
Engine, and when his father died he inherited the estate.
Mary Shelley, on the other hand, was not having a very good life. Two of her
children died, she suffered a miscarriage and nearly hemorrhaged to death,
and to top it all off, her husband of less than five years drowned in 1822,
leaving her a penniless widow with a two-year-old son who had been
ostracized from society. Sir Timothy Shelley, her father-in-law, initially
denied his own support unless she relinquished custody of her son, but she
refused and he never followed through. Even one of her best friends, Lord
Byron, died in 1824. She had nobody to turn to, and Sir Timothy Shelley was
now refusing to support her and her son unless she stopped publishing her
late husband's works. She settled down in London, living miserably in a
society that hated her and that she hated, working as a writer to support
her son, who, with the death of Charles Bysshe Shelley in 1835, became heir
apparent to the Shelley baronetcy. To top it all off, she contracted
smallpox in 1828.
Babbage's beloved wife Georgina died in 1827. In despair, he travelled to
the Continent for a brief respite from his woes, and when he returned his
initial grant was gone, forcing him to finance construction on his own. For
him, fate helped out at first. In 1828 he was appointed Lucasian chair of
mathematics in Cambridge, and in 1829 the Duke of Wellington, Prime Minister
of England, viewed a model of Babbage's engine and ordered a grant of 3,000
pounds. Babbage soon began construction on the engine, but he felt stifled.
Choosing to continue construction in his own house, he lost the assistance
of his workers. To make matters worse, Babbage had initally planned for six
decimal places and a second-order difference, but now he planned for an
Analytical Engine that could calculate 20 decimal places and a sixth-order
difference. The lengthened goal and the delays brought construction on the
Difference Engine to a halt.
The Gathering Storm
In 1832, Ada Lovelace met a woman named Mary Somerville, who encouraged her
mathematical studies and tried to put mathematics and technology into a
human context. Though history does not find it noteworthy, Ada Lovelace (the
daughter of the now-deceased Byron) and Mary Shelley did correspond, their
letters filled with angst over the incredible amount of death they had both
been put through. In 1834, while attending a party at Somerville's house,
Ada Lovelace was introduced to Babbage's ideas. She was enraptured, and the
two soon corresponded. Over the course of their writing, Babbage was soon
introduced to Mary Shelley, and even though history fails to record it, the
two of them also wrote back and forth, even using Percy Florence Shelley as
a means to pass letters between them from 1837 to 1841 (when Percy attended
Trinity College in Cambridge, and Babbage served as Lucasian chair of
mathematics at the same school.)
Babbage and Shelley's correspondance struck an important chord when William
Godwin, Mary's father, died in 1836. Since 1834, Babbage had been proposing
the idea of his new Analytical Engine to the English government, but met
with only refusal; they wanted him to finish his first project before they
would fnd a second. Babbage could not wait - his new Analytical Engine would
finally help Babbage calculate the factors involved in death, something that
had become important to the obsessive man through his discussions with
Shelley. Over the next 8 years, Babbage would spend 34,000 pounds of his own
and other people's money on these projects, and although he did work on
other projects as well (including I. K. Brunel's Great Western Railway),
Mary herself fell victim to a series of severe illnesses in 1839, and Ada
Lovelace, after publishing notes explaining a computer, also became quite
ill, never to recover. Babbage's search for the key to death became even
more obsessive.
Even though most of his work with death is hidden from history, bits of
Babbage's work on the mysteries of death did sneak out. In 1837 Babbage
published his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, in which he argued that miracles
are not violations of the laws of nature, but are simply an indication of
higher laws. Just like God could program nature to decide when people died,
so could Babbage program a calculating machine to discover the secrets of
when and why people would die. Babbage even went so far as to explore
biblical miracles, calculating that the chance of a man (such as Lazarus)
rising from the dead is 1 in 10^12.
Even as the Chancellor of the Exchequer was telling Babbage to abandon work
on the Difference Engine in 1842 (due to a lack of funds and a general
belief that the machine was 'worthless'), Babbage's world was becoming even
more involved with death. Mary's son, Percy, inherited the Shelley estate
with the death of Grandfather Sir Timothy Shelley. The Irish potato blight,
and the ensuing famine, killed over 1 million people and spurred waves of
immigration to America. And in 1848, Phineas Gage had his brain pierced by
an iron rod, yet lived; when he returned to work, he had a 'changed
personality,' and was described as 'fitful, irreverent, grossly profane,
impatient and obstinate,' things which were not at all Gage-like. Babbage
was fascinated by the story - how could a man live after having his brain
destroyed, and develop a new personality?
In 1851, Babbage's studies came to an abrupt halt. Mary Shelley, whom he had
grown to love, had died from a brain tumor. Babbage's search for the key to
death, and how to overcome it, had failed. He soon gave up all hope of
constructing the Analytical Engine, letting his dress become slovenly and
his attitudes even more horrid. Like Gage, he had become a changed man, and
he was hated by all. Children and adults followed and cursed him, dead cats
and feces were thrown at his house, windows were broken, and numerous death
threats were made. By the time his other love, Ada Lovelace, had died in
1852, he was a broken man, and fell into a bout of self-pity that would last
for several years.
The Shadows Deepen
In 1856, two unrelated events occurred which shaped all events to come.
First, Nikola Tesla was born. Secondly, Charles Babbage sent a proposal to
the Smithsonian Institution encouraging the production of 'Tables of
Constants of Nature and Art,' which would contain all numerical facts about
all of the sciences and arts. Though not expressely stated, this included
the science of death. Babbage had somehow emerged from his state of torpor
and had begun to explore the mysteries of death himself.
Events began to unfold further for Babbage in 1860, when South Carolina led
the secession from the Union at the beginning of the year, and Phineas Gage
died from seizures on May 21st. With what little money he had left, Babbage
boarded a ship and took a secret two-week journey to New York City. From
there, Babbage visited the site of the accident in Cavendish, Vermont,
visited the Darmouth Inn in Hanover, New Hampshire where Gage worked for a
while, and eventually made his way to San Francisco to visit Lone Mountain
Cemetery, where he attempted to perform a post-mortem study but was refused.
During this entire time, the hated Babbage was not missed by anyone, and
history does not record this journey of his, partly because it was swallowed
up by the brewing Civil War.
Indeed, on April 12, 1861, just as Babbage was on his way back from San
Francisco to New York, Fort Sumter was bombarded and the war was on. Babbage
was unable to find a way to travel directly to New York, and was forced to
make his way southward. By the time of the Battle of Bull Run on July 21, he
was in Texas, looking for a way to get home that wouldn't run into naval
blockades around southern ports. As he tried desperately to find his way, he
skipped around on various ships, watching the war to the north of him brew
yet more horrifying deaths. Shiloh - 13K Union, 11K Confederates killed -
more than the total killed in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812 and Mexican
War combined. Antietam, more than 10K dead on each side, making this the
singlemost bloody day of the entire war. Fredericksburg, 12K Union, 5K
Confederates killed. And so on.
As history does not record any of the details, it is not known exactly how
Babbage wound up in Haiti, but he did. And it was there, absorbed in the
deaths a few hundred miles to the north, and absorbed in his own studies of
death, that he discovered Vodun. It all clicked. Within months, Babbage had
become engrossed in Vodun belief and culture, and combining it with his own
mathematical knowledge, began to calculate the likelihood of death, the
likelihood of rising from the dead, and how to increase the odds in his
favor. As the Civil War raged on to the north through 1863, the number of
dead and dying increased, and the odds surged in Babbage's favor.
Chancellorsville, 10K+ Union, 10K+ Confederates killed. Gettysburg, 23K
Union, 28K Confederates killed or wounded. Chickamauga, 16K Union, 18K
Confederates killed. By November of 1864, as Sherman was cutting a 40 mile
wide swath of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah, Babbage had what he was
looking for.
Lightning Crashes
Armed with more knowledge about how to do what it is he was trying to do,
Babbage headed into the United States. Occupied with Sherman, the South
ignored his presence, and his experimentation on the dead and dying was
easily covered up as the attempts of a priest to administer final rites, or
of a surgeon tending to the dead (surgeons were never captured or shot at).
No record of the winter of 1864 remains, of course, but it is believed that
Babbage had some minimal success in bringing the dead back as zombies for a
limited amount of time. He had made the connection between death and the
energy of the soul, and could calculate the odds of a soul returning from
the other side, but he had no way of increasing those odds. Working his way
northward, satisfied with his experiments, Babbage found himself in Virginia
in May, when a series of events pushed his experiments further than he could
have ever hoped for.
History will show that in 1864, wireless electromagnetic waves were
transmitted some 14 miles in Virginia. History also shows that on May 6th of
that same year, thousands of wounded soldiers died in brushfires after the
Battle of the Wilderness. It was Babbage who connects these two events.
Administering "rights" to a young black soldier as the flames erupted around
him, Babbage succeeded, for the first time, in bringing a soul back across
from the other side. He had known the odds were in his favor, but he had no
idea exactly what he would bring across.
Papa Legba, the chief loa in Vodun beliefs, had been brought back across the
barrier in a tremendous release of energy that was felt and recorded for
miles around. The soldier Babbage had administered to, it turns out, had
been ridden by Legba several times before he was captured as a slave, fought
his way to freedom, and joined the Union army. Legba had felt a connection
with this soldier, and with Babbage's efforts had been able to step across.
Babbage and the reborn black soldier quickly made themselves scarce, and
during this time Babbage related all he knew to the reborn Legba, who was
eager to understand how he was brought back. Of course, Babbage had no idea
where this would lead.
By the time he had spilled his guts, it was April 8th, 1865 and Lee had
surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. There would be no more battles. No
more massive loss of life for Legba and Babbage to feed off of. No more
fracturing of the boundary between the worlds. Legba was furious. Who had
caused the war to end, he wondered? The chief of the Union army, Babbage
answered. President Lincoln. With that, the reborn black soldier dropped
dead. Babbage was horrified. Had his efforts been all for naught? Could he
not permanently return the dead to life? He had his answer in a few days.
Legba had skipped bodies, and was now riding the body of John Wilkes Booth.
On April 14, less than a week after the surrender, Abraham Lincoln was shot
and killed by Booth. Babbage was horrified, but by the time his conscience
got to him, Booth was shot and killed, and Babbage was satisfied that Legba
had been sent back to the hell he came from. Disgraced, he fled the country
and returned to England.
But it was not over. For the next 6 years, Babbage recorded everything he
had learned about death in his memoirs, hated by those in society and living
quite near poverty. He also devised cover stories, detailing trips around
England and Europe that explained his absences. And he would, perhaps, have
been successful in burying everything about his past, satisfied that it had
all gone down with him, had Legba truly been dead.
From October 8th to 11th, a great fire burned Chicago to the ground. The
world believes that it was caused by a cow kicking over a lantern. In a
letter sent to his home in London, Babbage learned the truth. The letter was
from P.L., written October 7th, 1871. It detailed Legba's coming attempts to
bring another of his kind across by 'tonight creating a conflagration like
that which brought me to this earth.' The letter, received by Babbage on
October 17th, was too much for his heart to bear. He had heard of the fire.
He knew the truth. He died the next day, a disappointed and embittered man.
Perhaps the only person who did not hate Babbage was Percy Florence Shelley,
to whom Babbage left all of his papers with the instructions to get them to
'someone capable of understanding their content, some man or woman dedicated
in pursuit, not afraid to walk against the current.'
The Lightning-Tamer
Percy lacked any of his parents' intellectual passion, and was well suited
to such a task. Aside from a losing run for parliament as a conservative, he
and wife Lady Jane St. John lived quietly, searching for a person meeting
Babbage's needs during his remaining days. Reading through the papers, not
understanding one whit of them, Percy failed to pass the papers on to people
who may have been able to understand them better. In 1874, for instance,
Roberts Bartholow electrically stimulated human cortical tissue. In 1875,
Richard Caton recorded electrical activity from the brain. And in 1878, John
Burden Sanderson and Frederick Page recorded the heart's electrical current.
Any of these men might have understood the papers.
Percy, however, chose to pass the papers on to the Edison company, headed,
of course, by Thomas Edison. The papers were sent to the Continental Edison
Company in Paris in 1884, from where they were supposed to travel to America
and find their way into Edison's hands. The papers were couriered by the
next of Edison's employees to make the trip - Nikola Tesla. Tesla was
fascinated with the papers, but decided to keep them for his own study
before passing them on to Edison. This never happened. Tesla worked briefly
with Edison before discovering a mutual dislike for one another, and he soon
sold some of his patent rights and opened his own laboratory in New York
City in 1887. He immediately began exploring the applications of Babbage's
calculations, focusing on finding the proper frequency on which the human
body ran, and on boosting the energy potential required to break the
life/death barrier. Percy wrote several times to inquire about the location
of the papers, but before he could do anything about Tesla's theft, he died,
childless, in 1889.
Tesla, like Babbage, was a bizarre individual that history has mostly
forgotten except for a few details. Without understanding WHY Tesla was
doing what he did, however, his experiments simply make him look like a
misguided genius. By the mid 1890s he had invented the 'Tesla coil,'
induction motor and other electrical motors, new forms of generators and
tranformers, a system of A/C power transmission, fluorescent lights and a
type of steam turbine, and had even begun work on a dynamic theory of
gravity. These 'credible' inventions are not usually connected with his
later work, even though they were an important first step.
Tesla's early inventions had given him a better grasp of how to do what he
wanted to do, and so his later, more 'exotic' experiments may seem weird. In
1899, for example, Tesla tested a 'death ray' in Colorado Springs, Colorado,
draining the energy from all electrical apparatus of a Colorado fuel company
nearby. In effect, this was a partially successful attempt to open the same
gateway Babbage had tapped into when he dragged Legba across. Similar
experiments took place for the next few years. That year, Tesla also
discovered terrestrial stationary waves, proving that the earth could be
used as a conductor and would be responsive to electrical vibrations of a
certain pitch. He lit lamps without wires from 25 miles away. He created
lightning. He even claimed to have contacted intelligent life forms from
'the other side' in a press release, though the press misunderstood and
passed off as the ramblings of a man who claimed to be speaking with green
men from another planet.
By 1900, Tesla's wireless energy transmission apparatus was sucking power
from a Colorado electric company some 6 miles away, and Tesla was ready to
do a live experiment. Unfortunately, Tesla was also running out of money,
and in 1907 construction on his Long Island laboratory ceased. This was a
major blow to Tesla, who turned to smaller projects and all but vanished
from sight. The next year, Paul Gable, an apparent self-made millionaire,
offered to fund Tesla's operations if he would keep quiet about it. Tesla
did so immediately. Over the next few years, not much is known about these
tests, though a variety of accidents and disasters have been attributed to
Tesla and Gable, ranging from 1908's Tunguska explosion to the sinking of
the Titanic in 1912. In 1914 the experiments started to gain momentum, not
coincidentally coming in the very same month that Archduke Ferdinand was
assassinated, and the world became embroiled in World War I. By September's
Battle of the Marne, in which 500 thousand men were killed or wounded, Tesla
was all but working for Gable, despite the fact that he had never met the
man; all of their communications were via letter or telegraph. There can be
no doubt that Tesla's experiments succeeded in bring other dead men back to
life. After all, by the time World War I ended, there were 8.3 million
military casualties, with some 20 million civilians dead of hunger and
disease. This is to say nothing of influenza outbreaks which would kill 21
million more in the US and Spain. The odds of success were tremendous, but
either Tesla recorded none, or these notes have not yet been found. The
Great Depression swallowed a lot more than lives. It swallowed a chunk of
history as well.
More well known are Tesla's press releases, which continued despite Gable's
protests. Luckily for Gable, Tesla was considered a fool, and the publicity
succeeded in making his projects look all the more foolish. Over the next
few years, Tesla would claim to be in frequent contact with 'the other side'
via radio waves; to be able to rip a hole in the earth; and to have a force
more powerful than 10 thousand airplanes. All of his statements were laughed
at, and Germany, catching wind of a scientist working on 'death rays,'
pretended to have their own.
By 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and started World War II, Tesla
must have had at least a few dozen successes, and had perfected the project.
But Gable's funds were also running out, and the duo were forced to turn to
another source for funding: the government. Hearing that Albert Einstein was
working on atomic bombs, and getting paid for it, Tesla and Gable decided to
take their own project before the government. As war raged on in Europe, the
Philadelphia Project was born. Fueled by the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of soldiers, the Philadelphia Project was a great success, even though the
government never really understood what it was doing - they thought that the
project was used to send naval ships and troops through time and space. But
with funding renewed, and others working on the project, Tesla was no longer
needed. Gable showed up one day, and old man walking with a crutch, looking
old far beyond his years. Tesla discovered everything, and realizing that
Gable was running the operation like a puppetmaster, he attempted to
sabotage tests being run on ships, resulting in the deaths of several crew,
who became melded with the ships' surfaces. He soon resigned his position,
and in 1943 he was found dead in his room in New York City, though there are
witnesses who claim he was pushed in front of a cab, then carried to his
room to die.
The Eternal Storm
Run from behind the scenes by Gable, the Philadelphia Project successfully
sent several battleships through 'time' as war raged on in Europe and
millions more died. In 1944, the largest invasion force in history had been
staged, with great difficulty. Was there not a better way to move troops?
Gable had the way to maneuver the project to benefit himself. Convinced that
they could teleport ships through time and space, the government also became
enamoured to the idea of sending ground troops from one continent to another
via the same means. Tests were run in secret on a very small scale.
By 1945, Germany was all but defeated, Hitler had killed himself, and the
Japanese were on the run. Both the Manhattan Project and the Philadelphia
Project were both ready for final testing, but President Roosevelt was
reluctant to take any steps forward. Gable met with Roosevelt in secret. A
few weeks later, President Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage and
Truman became President. Truman was told about the Manhattan project, which
had developed the atom bomb, and of the success of the Trinity tests in New
Mexico. Scientists working on the atomic bomb urged the President not to use
it, and to explore alternatives. Truman was faced with a hard choice.
On Sunday, July 22, 1945 at 9 am Eastern time, a 15-minute long land test of
the Philadelphia Project was held, attempting to send National Guard troops
from one corner of the country to another. Realizing that it would be harder
to hide tests on land than on sea, five test sites were chosen, and the
switches thrown simultaneously. With a faint red shimmer, all five test
sites vanished from sight, leaving smoky craters filled with mist in their
wake. One flickered and returned seconds later, all plantlife burned to ash,
nothing remaining but a shattered steel tower.
Our story begins during the final testing phase of the project. Four small
areas of the country have been locked into the grid and sent...elsewhere...
linking them in a 15 minute eternity in a hellish world of the undead. The
government thinks it is testing some sort of dimensional transfer device.
Papa Legba, aka Paul Gable, digs himself up from his grave and prepares. He
knows what will happen. Right now, four of the most powerful loa left on
the other side are in competition. The one whose armies get to the central
tower and throw the switch will be transported back to the real world. And
then an army of the dead, backed by two loa, will ravage the countryside
and rule the country.
...And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay...
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.
